Lee criticizes 'gangsta' culture

MURFREESBORO -- Filmmaker Spike Lee challenged minority students Thursday night to pursue their dreams and to fight against cultural or media messages which denigrate the value of education, saying many rap artists have done a disservice by promoting a culture of violence.

Lee spoke at Middle Tennessee State University as part of its International Conference on Cultural Diversity.

When Lee was in film school, there was only one active African-American director in Hollywood. Lee's first directorial effort, "She's Gotta Have It" (1986), along with Robert Townsend's "Hollywood Shuffle" (1987), ushered in a new wave of black filmmaking. But Lee says that while there are more films today by and about African Americans, many are "ghettoized" and rely too heavily on violence and stereotypes of "gangstas" and pimps.

Lee described a billboard in Los Angeles promoting the current film "Get Rich or Die Trying" which featured rapper Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson holding a gun in one hand and a microphone in the other. Lee said that billboard sends young black men the message that there are only two ways to succeed: "get a record deal or shoot the s**t out of somebody, excuse my language." Lee said the billboard has since been removed after criticism from the black community.

And the same messages are being promoted by many rap artists and, perhaps more important, by the record companies which determine what CDs get released. Lee said those negative stereotypes are just as damaging to white suburban teenagers, who are a key market for hip-hop CDs, as they are to black teenagers.

"We've put pimps on a pedestal," he said. While Lee has met the rapper Snoop Dogg and likes him personally, he said the promotion of Snoop Dogg's pimp image in mainstream culture -- such as a Chrysler ad featuring Snoop Dogg with Lee Iacocca -- is a bad thing.

Lee made the satirical comedy "Bamboozled" about a modern-day minstrel show, but he said current stereotypes are just as damaging.

"Minstrels are still with us today," he said.

"I love hip-hop," said Lee. "But there's certain things I'm just not going to get with." He said that when he was growing up, intelligence and education weren't looked down upon by his peers. But some aspects of popular culture as it relates to the black community now tend to denigrate anyone who speaks well or goes to college as having sold out.

Lee said Kanye West is an example of a hip-hop artist who is thoughtful and whose lyrics address something higher than the culture of the street.

'Positive people'

Lee urged the college students in the audience to pursue their dreams, even in cases where family members do not understand. He said too many of his classmates wound up working for 20 years in jobs they hated because they were trying to please the family members who had sent them to college. In some cases, he said, those classmates were the first members of their family to ever go to college.

"It has been my experience that parents kill more dreams than anybody," he said, though they do it without meaning to and often with the best of intentions.

Lee, by comparison, followed his father and a grandfather to Morehouse College. (His mother and a grandmother had both gone to Spellman College.) He struggled with a vocation; after the second semester of his sophomore year, he had taken his general education courses and used up his electives and still didn't know what he wanted to do with his life.

"Growing up in Brooklyn, N.Y., I had no idea I wanted to grow up and become a filmmaker," he said. He loved watching movies but gave no thought to the creative process that put them on screen. As a child, he dreamed of playing second base for the Mets.

At home from college in Brooklyn, during the summer of 1977, he could not get a summer job and spent his time playing with a Super 8 movie camera he had received as a Christmas gift. When he returned to Morehouse in the fall, he chose a mass communications major and began taking film classes. His professor encouraged him to edit his Super 8 footage into a movie, and he did that. His classmates liked the 45-minute film, titled "Last Hustle In Brooklyn."

"What's even more important, I got the response that I wanted," he said.

Lee told the grandmother who had put him through Morehouse that he wanted to go to graduate film school at New York University, and she agreed to send him, a pivotal act of support given the expense of the program. Lee said his grandmother, now 99 and living in Atlanta, is not wealthy but saved the money she earned from 50 years working as an art teacher.

"As a young person," he told his audience, "you have to surround yourself with positive people."

Hard work

Lee said the importance of film school was not the degree but the access to professional film equipment. NYU was where Lee began honing his craft, even though it would be years before his breakthrough directorial effort.

Lee said today's young filmmakers have more options for honing their craft. Lee's "Bamboozled" was shot on consumer video cameras -- not professional equipment but a model which is sold to the public. He said some of his students edit films on laptop computers.

"You have to roll up your sleeves and work hard," he said. He complained that reality TV gives young people the message that they can immediately be plucked from obscurity and made into a success.

Lee's notable films include "Do The Right Thing," "Malcolm X," "School Daze," "Jungle Fever," "Bamboozled" and the documentary "4 Little Girls." His next film scheduled for release is "Inside Man," starring his frequent leading man Denzel Washington, whom Lee called "the world's greatest actor," as a New York Police Department hostage negotiator and Clive Owen as a bank robber who has taken hostages. This will be the fourth film that Lee and Washington have worked on together.

Lee started work last Friday on a documentary for Home Box Office about Hurricane Katrina. He has interviewed evacuees living in New York and will travel to New Orleans to begin work there the day after Thanksgiving.

Several Xavier students who were displaced by the hurricane and are now studying at Fisk University in Nashville identified themselves during the question-and-answer session following Lee's remarks and offered to show him scenes of destruction or put him in touch with people who were affected.

Politics

Lee attacked the notion that one cannot support the troops while criticizing the military effort in Iraq.

"Somehow, if you speak against the war, it means automatically that you don't support the troops. That's crazy logic," he said.

Lee complained that the divide between rich and poor is widening in America.

"This country is slowly wiping out the middle class," he said, predicting that class will become more of a dividing factor than race in the years to come.

"We're very good here in America at hiding the poor," he said.

When asked if he would vote for Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice for president, Lee scoffed at the notion and ridiculed Rice's comment in an interview that she never experienced any racism while growing up in the South.

Lee also called for improvements to public education, calling the current system "horrible" and claiming that the wealthy pull their children out and place them in private schools.

MTSU President Dr. Sidney McPhee announced prior to Lee's remarks that more than 900 people had registered for the diversity conference, which continued today in Nashville.